2025 - Ageing and neural variability

Download instructions, tag 2025_Q3_Zang_et_al_Aging

This is the dataset associated with the publication Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task.

Behavioural, electrophysiology and video data were collected from C57BL/6 mice performing the IBL visual decision-making task. The dataset combines previously released brain-wide map recordings with additional lifespan recordings from older mice. Animals were 3–20 months old at the time of recording.

The analysis repository contains the code, intermediate results and a query example used for the publication. The analysis code is also archived on Zenodo.

Overview of the data

The study analysed 149 mice across 367 sessions and 503 Neuropixels probe insertions. Recordings covered 16 regions of interest in cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, midbrain, basal ganglia and olfactory areas. From 242,671 recorded units, including multi-unit activity, 18,755 neurons passed the quality-control criteria used in the publication.

Dataset source	Project
Lifespan recordings	`churchland_learninglifespan`
Brain-wide map recordings	`ibl_neuropixel_brainwide_01`

The paper treats age as a continuous variable. For visualisation, mice were divided into younger and older groups using 7.6 months, the mean age in the dataset, as the cutoff.

Data structure and download

The organisation of the data follows the standard IBL data structure. The following example queries all sessions included in the release, then separates the lifespan and brain-wide map components.

from one.api import ONE

TAG = '2025_Q3_Zang_et_al_Aging'

one = ONE(base_url='https://openalyx.internationalbrainlab.org')

sessions = one.alyx.rest('sessions', 'list', tag=TAG)
lifespan_sessions = one.alyx.rest(
    'sessions', 'list', tag=TAG, projects='churchland_learninglifespan'
)
brainwide_sessions = one.alyx.rest(
    'sessions', 'list', tag=TAG, projects='ibl_neuropixel_brainwide_01'
)

print(f'All sessions: {len(sessions)}')
print(f'Lifespan sessions: {len(lifespan_sessions)}')
print(f'Brain-wide map sessions: {len(brainwide_sessions)}')

To go further, see:

The data structure guide to download an example session and learn the IBL data structure
The data download guide to search for and download released datasets with ONE
The data-loading examples for specific loading functions
The publication’s query example for the exact project-level queries used by the authors

Note:

The tag associated with this release is 2025_Q3_Zang_et_al_Aging.
The release contains sessions from the churchland_learninglifespan and ibl_neuropixel_brainwide_01 projects.

How to cite this dataset

If you use this dataset in your research, please cite:

Zang, F., Khanal, A., Förster, S. et al. Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task. Nature Communications 17, 8156 (2026).
For analysis code and intermediate results, Zang, F. & Rai, P. Age-related changes in behavioral and neural variability in a decision-making task. Zenodo (2026).
If you use the brain-wide map component, follow the citation guidance on the brain-wide map data release page.

Data release notes and changelog

2025 Q3: initial release

The release tag used for the publication was added, combining the lifespan recordings with the brain-wide map sessions included in the analysis.